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(image) I’m a fan of “open.” Anyone who knows me, knows this about me.

But I’m also a fan of “easy.” And of “good design.” So, for the past couple of years, I’ve been an iPhone user, mainly because it was easy, and had better design than any alternative. Also, my company supported the iPhone, even though it was terrible for calendar, contacts, email, you know, pretty much everything that mattered to me.

But because I’m no longer day to day at my company, I’ve been eager to move away from the iPhone, for many reasons, including the extraordinarily awful experience I recently had, chronicled here. And I really like the philosophy of Android. It’s open, it’s hackable, it’s generative in all the right ways.

However, it’s also a utterly confusing mess. Alas, this seems to be the price of “open” – chaos.

There are something like 800 versions of Android, a developer who I was interviewing for my book told me today. EIGHT HUNDRED! And every one of them might change at any time. There’s versions modified by all the carriers around the world (stuffed with crapware, bloatware, portalware). Versions modified by all the handset makers – one for each phone, sometimes (same crap). Versions for televisions (I hear the new Samsung TVs are utterly borked with unchangeable bullsh*t). Versions that are specific to Google’s “own” products. And versions that have been so forked as to be spoons, like what Amazon’s done with Kindle.

This is not a new complaint. To those of you out there who are sophisticated, it’s terribly naive. You’ve spent your 72 hours deciding which one to buy, setting it up, working out the kinks, and now it works great for you (or maybe your IT department did that work for you). Congratulations. I wish I had the time. But if that’s what it takes to make a damn smart phone “smart”, I want something better.

I’m not afraid to admit it: I want an Android phone, I’m willing to spend lavishly to get the best one, but after hours of research, I’m utterly f*cking confused about which product to buy. One thing I do know – once I buy it, I don’t want to spend three days figuring out how to make it work.

Is anyone else having this issue? Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, I recall that one of my predictions for last year was this: “Google will focus on providing a clear, consistent experience through Android for tablets and mobile, but it will take a third party to unify the experience. I don’t see that happening this year.”

Yeah, it didn’t happen in 2011. And it’s not happening this year, though I can *feel* the pain at Google HQ as the folks there watch Android splinter into a million hamfisted pieces of forkin’ crap. Is this why they bought Motorola? One wonders.

Can Google put all the pieces together again? I certainly hope so. But there has to be a better way. Do you remember the Blackberry? Remember how magical that was? God, I sound old. And yes, I hear the Windows phone is really cool. But I’ve only heard that once.

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Family, colleagues, and friends knew this day was coming, I knew it was coming, but here it is: I’ve rented a new place to write, a small, remote house directly on the beach, about 12 miles as the crow flies from my home in Marin county. It’s not a direct 12 miles – that crow would have to fly up about 2500 feet so as to clear the peak of Mt. Tamalpais. And that mountainous impediment is intentional – it takes close to the same time to ride a mountain bike from my home to this office as it does to drive one of several winding routes between here and there. I’m hoping that will spur me to take my commute by bicycle. I won’t be here every day, but I certainly hope to spend a fair bit of time here over the coming months.

I’ve added this new address to my long list of offices for one reason: To complete the book I’ve been talking about for nearly half a decade. That book began as an idea I called “The Conversation Economy,” but grew in both scope and ambition to encompass a much larger idea: an archaeology of the future, as seen through the digital artifacts of the present. Along the way, it’s changed a lot – 18 months ago, its title was “What We Hath Wrought.” Now, I’m thinking it’ll be called “If/Then.” I may yet call it “If/Then…Else” – or, as I wander through this journey, it might end up as something entirely different.

At this moment, I’m not certain. And that’s a bit scary.

I’ve made many false starts at this book, and I’ve failed on more than one occasion to truly commit to it. There are many reasons why, but I think the main one is that I believe this project requires that I place it first, ahead of anything else. And until recently, that’s simply been impossible. As readers know, up until this year, I ran the Web 2 Summit, which I put on hiatus this year so I could focus on the book. I’m also founder and Executive Chair of an Internet media startup, now in its seventh year. Federated Media Publishing has undergone many changes since 2005, and doubtless will see many more as it navigates what is an exciting and tumultuous media market. And because I’m a founder, I’ve always placed FMP ahead of anything else – even as I handed over CEO duties to a far more competent executive than myself 18 months ago.

In the past few months, I’ve been getting ready to put the book first, and it’s not an easy thing to do. Not just because of the rapid evolution in the media business (for more on that, see my “Death of Display” post), but because committing to a book project is an act of faith – faith that isn’t necessarily going to be rewarded.

Staring at a blank screen, knowing you have things to say, but not being certain how to say them, that’s just hard. I’ve been practicing for nearly a year. It’s time to get in the game.

I’ll still be a very active Chair at FMP, and I’ve got a few more long-planned trips to take, but for the most part, my calendar is cleared, and I’m ready to start. I’ve already spent the past year doing scores of interviews, reporting trips, and research on the book. I’ve got literally thousands of pages of notes and clips and sketches to go through. I’ve got many, many drafts of outlines and just as many questions to answer about where this book might take me. And of course, I’ll be writing out loud, right here, as I wander in the woods. I hope you’ll come along for the trip.

In my continuing quest to reflect on books which I have found important to my own work, I give you a work of fiction, first published in mid-2011: Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel, by Gary Shteyngart, an acclaimed writer born in Russia, now living in the US. This is my first read of Shteyngart, known also for his previous works Absurdistan and Russian Debutante’s Handbook, both of which established him as an important new literary voice (Ten Best Books – NYT, Book of the Year – Time, etc. etc….). Of course, I was barely aware of Shteyngart until a friend insisted I read “Super Sad” and I will forever be grateful for the recommendation.

Based in a future that feels to be about thirty years from now (the same timeframe as my pending book), Shteyngart’s story stars one Lenny Abramov, a schlumpy 39-year-old son of Jewish Russian immigrants who lives in New York City. Abramov works at a powerful corporation that sells promises of immortality to “High Net Worth” individuals. But he’s not your typical corporate climber: The book begins in Italy, where Abramov has taken a literary vacation of sorts – he’s left an America he no longer loves to be closer to a world that he does – a dying world of art, literature, and slower living. But Abramov’s duty to his parents and his need for money drive him back to America, where most of the action occurs.

It turns out the future hasn’t been very kind to America. Just about every possible concern one might have about our nation’s decline has played out – the economy is in a death spiral, the Chinese pretty much control our institutions, large corporations control what the Chinese don’t, books and intelligent discourse have disappeared, shallowness and rough sex are glorified, and the Constitution has pretty much been suspended. Oh, and while the book doesn’t exactly put it this way, Facebook and Apple have won – everyone is addicted to their devices, and to the social reflections they project.

It doesn’t take long for a reader to realize Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel is also a work of science fiction, but somehow, that construct doesn’t get in the way. In fact, it’s rather fascinating to watch an accomplished literary novelist tackle “the future,” and do a pretty damn good job at it. I’m no science fiction expert, but Shteyngart projects our present day obsessions with devices, data, social networking, and the like into a dystopia that feels uncomfortably possible. Everyone is judged by their credit scores, their youthful appearance, and their ability to gather attention from denizens of an always on, always connected datasphere (those that are particularly good at getting attention are dubbed “very Media!”). Shteyngart is clearly working fields well sown by Dick, Gibson, Stephenson, Doctorow, and many others, but it works for me anyway.

The story is indeed a love story – an improbable and poignant one at that – between Lenny, a middle-aged man beset by insecurities, and a young Korean woman caught between familial duty and the pointless, consumer-driven world of shopping and social networking. The narrative is driven by America’s collapse into a security state, and I won’t give away any more of the plot than that. I’ll leave it here: By the end of this often hilarious novel, you will feel super sad, and you may also come to question the path we are on as it relates to data. I know that’s a pretty odd thing to say about a love story, but data, in fact, plays a central role in the novel’s meaning. Here are a few of the passages I highlighted:

“Shards of data all around us, useless rankings, useless streams, useless communiqués from a world that was no longer to a world that would never be.”

“I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.”

“Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us.”

“And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I’m talking about, would be gone.”

“I wanted to be in a place with less data, less youth, and where old people like myself were not despised simply for being old, where an older man, for example, could be considered beautiful.”

That last passage is from near the end of the book, when the fate of our protagonist has resolved – I won’t tell you how, in case you haven’t read the book. And if that is the case….I certainly recommend that you do.

Earlier in the week I traveled to the annual Google Zeitgest conference, where I’ve been honored to be a moderator for the past few years. This year I was given the challenge of tacking a 90-minute block on “The World We Dream,” which featured an extraordinary set of speakers. The session included a short interview with two impressive folks: Ron Garan, a NASA astronaut who has spent 180 days in space, and Lisa Randall, a celebrated theoretical physicist and author. I’ve never spent as much time prepping for a 20-minute interview as I did for this – in part because the Higgs Boson is not that easy for the laymen to grok, nor is the concept of floating around in space. If you are so inclined, enjoy:

I’ve been working with my site design partner Blend to try to track down a spammer who has taken my entire site and repurposed it as their own, replete with tons of ads and a clear intent to draft off Searchblog’s quality content (if I do say so myself) and, most likely, its pagerank as well.

The site is “hubadverts.com” and no, I’m not going to link to it. Each of my posts is ripped off as a URL including that domain – if you click on the domain, you get a scammy feeling ecommerce site. But at “hubadverts.com/on-data/” for example, you will see a recent post of mine, scraped in its entirety.

The funny thing about this site it that it scrapes my full text RSS feed, then rebuilds my site. Then it has spammy sites trackback to the rebuilt site, and leave comments there. Oddly, those trackbacks and comments are emailed to me as if I was the WordPress administrator of the site. Of course, the last thing I am going to do is try to log into the back end of the site, because that would give the spammers access to the backend login information of my own site. It’s phishing and blackhat SEO all rolled into one!

The “news hub” where my ripped-off posts reside includes an ad urging folks to “Unblock the Pirate Bay,” which concerns me, because just writing this post probably is inviting a DDOS attack. But I don’t think ripping off my site and damaging my reputation is defensible, and I’m speaking up about it.

I emailed Toni Schneider, the CEO of WordPress, for advice, and he suggested I change my RSS feeds so the scrape includes attribution. I did so, and sure enough, now the spam site attributes Searchblog and links back to it. (I am very fortunate to have Toni as a colleague!). However, while this proved the site was scraping my RSS feed, it doesn’t solve the problem. Toni suggested some other remedies, which we are looking into, but he also suggested I do what I’m doing now: Public shaming. After all, the site is violating my non-commercial Creative Commons license, and quite possibly damaging my own pagerank – Google doesn’t like it when spammy sites are seen as linking to you, and it hates duplicate content.

So I want it stopped. But a lookup of the site’s owners show the listing is private – I don’t have anyone to go after. And the site itself is an endless mousetrap of scammy ecommerce sites, among other things.

Hence, I’m asking you, the Searchblog readers, who are always smarter than I, to help me figure out a way to make this right. Any ideas?

Yesterday I participated in OpenCoSF. After weeks of preparation, we really had no idea how it was going to turn out, but to judge from the Twitter buzz, it seems folks had a really good time, and the vibe of open collaboration, rapid iteration, and “run with it” mentality really took over. Thanks to everyone involved. Below is my “Storified” version of the day:

I’m getting really excited about OpenCoSF, which we’ve managed to spin up in record time. It’s truly an example of collective good intent in action. More than 80 wonderful companies are now participating, each opening their doors to the public and presenting their own stories, in situ. On Friday, Oct. 12, more than 1000 folks will be combing San Francisco’s SOMA, Mission, Mid-Market, Embarcadero, and Dogpatch neighborhoods, checking out the special sauce that makes innvative businesses tick. Check out the lineup so far (I only wish we could every single company that applied – next year!). You can register for free here. We’ll be launching the “lineup picker” very soon!

I’m very excited to announce that registration is now open for OpenCoSF, a new kind of event that I’m helping to bring into the world.

Registration is free and open to anyone who’s interested in innovation in the Bay area. You can sign up here. Already about 1,000 people have expressed interest in coming, and I think we’ve got room for another 500 or so, if my math is correct.

So what is OpenCo? Well, it’s one the “seeds” that’s been germinating since I wrote the It’s Hard to Lay Fallow post back in the early summer. A few months before that, I took a mountain bike ride with one of my pals in the business, Magna Global managing partner Brian Monahan. Brian is on the board of sfBIG, a large Bay area marketing and Internet organization. At a recent meeting, the board was tossing around ideas for how to shine a brighter light on the unique culture of innovation here in San Francisco and beyond. The idea of an event came up, and knowing my experience with the Web 2 Summit (now on hiatus) and Federated’s Signal series, Brian asked my advice.

As we climbed up a particularly steep part of the Marin Headlands, Brian posited a new approach to conferences: an “open studio” of sorts, where conference attendees ventured out into the world to see entrepreneurs and leaders in their native environment. I found the idea compelling, if logistically terrifying. It’s one thing to ask a thousand or more folks to gather in one place. It’s quite another to ask them to spread out across an entire city.

The ever-expanding lineup of companies participating in OpenCoSF.

But there was something about Brian’s excitement, and the core of his idea, that really stuck with me. If you’ve read my The Power of Being There post, I think you know where I’m going with this. For more than 15 years, I’ve been running conferences where hundreds of folks gather in a dark, windowless ballroom to hear from leaders of innovative companies. There’s a lot to be said for this model, but the idea of people actually visiting those companies, in their native environment, just felt right.

I began to develop the idea, producing an overview model and description. I figured we’d execute the first “Open Innovation Studios” (our early name) in the Spring, which gave us enough time to secure the partnerships necessary to get a new event launched. I figured it’d run for three days, with a headquarters in the center of the city, and a plenary conference to kick it off on day one.

Then I ran into the Mayor of San Francisco at a cocktail party at Ron Conway’s house. Ever the connector, Ron told the Mayor about our idea, and the Mayor told me he was planning to announce October as Innovation Month in San Francisco. Could we perhaps do our event then?

And off we went. In less than three months, an extraordinary coalition of the willing has come together to produce the first ever OpenCoSF. Our first iteration is a pilot of sorts – we’re limiting the participating companies to 75 or 80, and we’re running the open studios for just one day, Friday, October 12. We’ll be kicking things off with a short plenary and cocktail party the evening of the 11th (Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Github CEO Tom Preston-Werner, and Conway will be speaking, along with the Mayor).

Even though it’s a pilot, the response so far has been overwhelming. Companies hosting OpenCo sessions include leaders like Twitter, Salesforce, Zynga, Yammer, Adobe, Jawbone, and Google, as well as well known startups such as airbnb, Hipmunk, HotelTonight, Nextdoor, Cloudera, and scores more. And it’s not just tech or Internet – we’ve got chocolate startup TCHO, grilled cheese innovator The Melt, hospitality leader Kimpton, and UCSF, which is a leader in biomedicine. Silicon Valley Bank and The Interpublic Group – in particular its Universal McCann, IPG Mediabrands, and 215McCann agenies – have lent their time and treasure to the effort. AnthemWW has lent a big hand, as has sf:citi and of course sfBIG. Federated Media Publishing is providing a venue for day one, as well as a number of key staff resources. And more companies and sponsors are in the works in the coming days.

OpenCoSF is a prime example of the collaborative spirit that makes San Francisco great. It’s indicative of a desire to share our stories, celebrate our culture, and strengthen our community. If you sign up, you’ll notice that the site acts a lot like a music festival – you’ll see a “lineup” and in a few days we’ll be launching a “company picker” – where you’ll be able to schedule your company visits by timeslot and “stage” – our name for neighborhoods like the Mission, SOMA, or the Financial District. The lineup app is thanks to our partnership with DoStuff Media – the folks powering sites for music festivals like Outside Lands and Lollapalooza. And OpenCoSF is certainly a festival, a celebration of the innovative ecosystem that makes a city like San Francisco special. I hope you’ll join us!

I think I’ve said it before, if you want to attract attention, write about Apple. A rant which had been boiling inside me for some months finally erupted into words last Thursday, and since that post, more than 60,000 people have come to this site, leaving more that 300 comments and sharing the story’s link nearly 3000 times across four or so social networks.

That may be normal for a site like the Huffington Post, but I think it’s a record for Searchblog. Methinks I touched a nerve.

What I found most interesting was the tone of the response – I had anticipated the standard Apple defenders to come out with blades sharpened, calling me a dumb old skool punter or worse. There was some of that, but the vast majority of folks who commented, either on Twitter, Facebook or here on the site, were instead supportive of my point of view, adding their own frustrating stories, as well as helpful suggestions.

Chief among them was pointing out the iOS feature that brings you back to the top of any list by touching the clock (who knew? Not me). That solved one of the larger irritations I have with the iPhone, but not the largest – which is this yellow “other” goo that has taken over my phone’s storage. For that, I had to head to my nearby Apple store – I made the appointment online.

Saturday I drove over to the store, which was, as always, buzzing with a kind of high-household-income testosterone (regardless of gender). I met my “Apple Genius” and explained my problems. I showed him my post, and explained that while I had many issues with Apple, all I wanted was the yellow goo to go away.

My Genius was a very nice fellow, clearly aware of the storage issue. This was not the first, or even the 100th, time he’d dealt with it. He explained that it was probably corrupted software in the phone’s OS, and that a clean restore would most likely fix the problem. I told him I’d tried that already, twice, but admitted that perhaps I had done something wrong.

Funny aside: As I was showing him my post, I explained that many commentators had scolded me for not knowing about how “touching the clock” took you back to the top of contacts and initiated a search. He was dumbstruck – he had the same problem as me, and didn’t know about the feature either. So at least I don’t feel as stupid as before.

Anyway, the Genius (I’m protecting his name and location) did an initial software scan and told me that yes, my phone had a software problem. What kind of problem, I asked? He said the scan didn’t say, just that he needed to “update the firmware.” That meant, essentially, wiping my phone back to factory settings, then restoring it from a backup. Fortunately I had brought my computer as well, so he did a backup, then proceeded to install the new firmware.

While we were waiting, I asked Mr. Genius if the “problem” was corruption in the software, or if it was a known bug that Apple had fixed in more recent firmware updates. I suspected it was a known bug, given how prevalent my yellow goo problem was (it’s all over the Apple boards). He said he wasn’t sure, but admitted it was likely a firmware bug that had been fixed later. It often had something to do with the upgrade to iOS 5 and forcing people to use the cloud, he admitted.

The phone was now ready for its backup, but when he attached it to my computer, the restore process was going to take well over an hour (I had a lot of photos, and he said that takes a lot of time to transfer.) I couldn’t sit at the store for an hour, so I told him I’d do it at home, if that was OK. He said of course, and I was on my way. At this point, the phone was clean as a whistle, but it also wasn’t “my” phone – it was back to its “pristine” state.

You can probably guess where this is going, or I’d not be wasting your time. I got home, chose the backup the Genius had made to my phone, and let it run while I did some chores around the house. When I got back I checked the iTunes storage to see if the goo was gone. Indeed it was, but so were my photos. And my apps. For whatever reason, my music was there. Nothing else.

That was odd. I called the Apple store and asked to speak to my Genius, but they aren’t really set up for that kind of follow up. After sitting on hold for ten minutes, another person came on, admitted my Genius had left for the day, apologized for my predicament, but had no solution for me other than to suggest I use an earlier version of the phone’s backup. Turns out there was one, from about a week ago. So I decided to backup from that version.

I’m about three hours of time into this by now, for those keeping count at home.

So, to review where I was: I had a iPhone with totally new, up to date firmware but without most of my original data, because the backup made at the Apple store was somehow incomplete. And I was now going to replace that backup with one made a week earlier.

Which I did. And this time the backup took a lot longer, which to me was a good sign: My photos must be transfering this time!

After about 45 minutes, the process was complete, and it was time to check the Goo-O-Meter.

Uh oh:

I had a tiny bit less goo, and I had my photos, but not my apps. I realized I could get those later by sync’ing apps in iTunes, so I punted on figuring that out (and there wasn’t room on the phone anyway). Regardless, I was on hour four, and this was NOT progress.

PhoneDisk To The Rescue

It was about this point that I decided that if I was going to solve this problem, I was going to have to do it myself. Earlier in the year I had purchased a utility called PhoneDisk, now known as iExplorer. It’s a great piece of software that lets you mount your iPhone as if it were just another hard drive. It “roots” your phone – showing all the files that are in there, even if the opaque Apple iOS doesn’t (or won’t).

I figured it couldn’t hurt to use PhoneDisk to see if there were folders and files that looked….off.

And yep, I sure found something. Turns out I had more than 17 gigabytes of “recordings” – memos from Apple’s Voice Memo application that comes standard with every phone. Now, I’ve used that app about 30 times, and my phone showed about half that many recordings when I looked using the app itself (I’d deleted the others). But using PhoneDisk, I found more than 1200 recordings! And guess what – more than 1000 of them were duplicates, many duplicates of memos I’d deleted over the years!

I decide to delete all the duplicates using PhoneDisk. First I backed up the entire 17 gigs on a 4-terabyte drive I happen to have (handy, I’ll admit). Then I sync’d music with “Include Voice Memos” unchecked (it had been checked). I was hoping that might get rid of the dupes. No luck.

My next step was to delete some test files from the iPhone using PhoneDisk, just to see if it reduced my yellow goo factor. I identified one 42.6-megabyte file that was duplicated 97 times – I trashed 96 of them.

By the way, I’m into hour five of working on this problem, thanks Apple! But I’m sure this is what the company means when it markets itself as revolutionary and elegant and all that.

After the 96 files were moved to the trash and the trash emptied, the yellow goo did not immediately disperse, but I know enough about the Mac to know you need to restart everything to see if anything “took.” I disconnected the iPhone and reconnected it. Of course, it starts to sync (as it always does), and that sync was taking a Very Long Time.

It seemed to be hung on the “backing up” part of the sync. So I tried to kill the sync. I was too eager to see if I had cleared some of the goo. Well, when I hit the little “x” that allows you to stop a sync, I got the infamous Apple Spinning Ball of Death.

I fired up iTunes again….and stopped it from synching the phone immediately.

And yes! Minor success – 5 gigabytes of yellow goo – the amount I deleted using PhoneDisk, is now gone!!! But I am not triumphant – because I sense that as soon as I sync and back up – a process which cannot be avoided, those duplicate files may return. I must be cautious. I have many miles to tread.

The next hour or so is spent deleting files from the iPhone and insuring commensurate reduction in my phone’s goo. Finally, I restart everything, connect the phone, let it sync (that took half and hour) and….SUCCESS!

Yes, six hours later, my phone is (mostly) yellow goo free, and I’ve identified the culprit, some kind of duplications bug in the Voice Memo app.

Will it come back? Who knows. Is my experience typical? I bet not. But let’s just be clear about one thing: This. Ain’t. Easy.

Completely through happenstance, I came upon this post I wrote for American Express more than four years ago. I think it still stands up today. I never posted it on Searchblog, and I’d like my writing to be collected here. So call this a lightly edited blast from the archives….

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Every Great Business Is An Argument

OK, so maybe that title is meant to provoke a response, but is that so wrong? This post is about arguments, after all. Or put another way: I’d like to argue that the best businesses are, in essence, arguments.

There are many definitions of the word “argument,” but the one I want to focus on is the one that comes up first when you type define:argument into Google: “A fact or assertion offered as evidence that something is true; (as in) ‘it was a strong argument that his hypothesis was true.’”

In my experience starting businesses, and in my study of other businesses that have succeeded wildly (like Apple, Google, or eBay), every great business is founded in a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the business’s job to go prove that thesis – in essence, the business becomes the argument that proves the thesis.

Wired, for example, was founded on the thesis that digital technologies were forever changing the face of human society – from culture to politics, business to pleasure. We then made a business out of proving that thesis. Every single issue of Wired, every page of HotWired, every book we published and every deal we did was an argument proving that thesis.

The Industry Standard was founded on the thesis that a new class of entrepreneurs and executives were leveraging the Internet to change the economy as we knew it. We then started a site, a magazine, a conference series, and 14 international editions as arguments in proof of that thesis. (OK, the argument failed after five years, but I do still believe the thesis!)

The Web 2.0 conference series also had a thesis: That the web post-crash (after 2001-2) was radically different than the web of the late 1990s, and that a new breed of company, leader, and philosophy had taken hold across the industry. The Web 2 Summit and its Expo businesses, again, were arguments proving that thesis.

And Federated Media was founded in a thesis as well: That the economics of content creation and consumption have shifted significantly in the past decade, creating a new class of conversational media in need of a new business model. FM is the argument in proof of that thesis.

Well that’s all well and fine, you may say, but those are all media companies. This thesis/argument stuff won’t scale to other kinds of businesses.

I disagree. Consider a dry cleaning business, for example. One of the most successful new businesses in my neighborhood is a small company called Alex’s Dry Cleaning Valet. This business has a strong thesis: That it’s possible to provide high-end dry cleaning services and also lead the industry in using renewable, green, and sustainable technologies. Put another way, Alex’s thesis is even more simple: Dry cleaning doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to ruin the environment, and you should be able to talk to someone who knows who you are and will respond to whatever issues you have (a broken button, a rush delivery, a question about a bill).

Alex’s is an argument for the thesis that a dry cleaner can be both green and conversational (for more on what I mean by conversational business, see here and here). When I sent an email to their site asking about pricing, I got an answer from Alex himself, and we argued (literally, but in a very nice way) back and forth over whether what he charges was fair for value given. Alex clearly is passionate about his business, his value proposition, and his thesis. And that makes his business a great argument for a thesis I, as a customer, am happy to buy into.

So the question to all of you who run or are thinking of running your own business: What’s your thesis? What differentiates your business from all the others in your market? Once you get that thesis, the rest is pretty easy. Everyone loves a good argument, after all!